A Generalization of Gray and Whaley's Option

Abstract

Options markets display interesting features. Most options are executed when they are near the money. However, the underlying asset price varies significantly during the life-time option. It is therefore difficult to predict the future option position. In order to make options' markets more liquid, the paper proposes to replace all options into At-the-Money (ATM) ones by resetting the strike price X to the asset price at pre-specified time point t, before maturity time T. Strike price is locked in at the then underlying asset price S_{t} regardless whether it is above or below S_{t}.The reset condition is in exchange for deposit in the Clearing House. The idea is to provide a general valuation of reset option of Gray and Whaley (1999) in which reset condition does not depend on the relation between the strike price and the underlying asset price. The contribution of this paper is double. First, it shows that our general model option, under specific conditions, can be generalized to the most common ones like for example Black-Scholes-Merton, forward-start and strike reset pricing formulae etc... Second, in line with Haug and Haug (2001), we use the CRR binominal approach (Cox et al., 1979) and an estimation program of the cumulative bivariate normal distribution to provide closed-form solution for the pricing of the generalized European reset option.